


Tehillim

by kvikindi



Series: The Building of the House [2]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Gen, Holocaust, Israel, M/M, Post-X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 14:17:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8404831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: Erik, in Israel, afterwards: another life he could have had. If.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story follows [The Building of the House](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8121451), and there are a few references to that story here.

 

From the window of the taxi into Jerusalem, he sees hares in the brush at the side of the road. Their narrow bodies are frozen: to leap or not to leap? Their wild eyes are unreadable. Perhaps full of fear.

Here, in the wastelands, there is no water.

Only hawks, crows. Other scavengers. Eaters.

Erik pulls the brim of his dark hat low. He’s wearing sunglasses against the glare of August. This desert country. Yellow as American backroads. Thin crust of cities determined to efface the past. Shades of ’58. Last time he was here. _You Europeans. Always looking backwards. You have to learn to let go._ Two years later their tune had changed. But not enough.

Another life he could have had. If. Memories of learning Hebrew. Illiterate in his own language. For weeks. Months. Still always the accent. The flickers of— In other people’s faces. He keeps his arms covered whenever he’s here. In America they don’t think. Or not so many. It’s ancient history. Ironic. How effortless the forgetting for them.

A bird of prey dives from the sandy sky. Not sharav season. Just the color. He watches it, hoping. Not the limp body of a little hare. Let the hares be all right. Adonai I once didn’t believe in. God of the stirring things in the grasses. The deer and the field mouse. The rock rabbit. The squirrel.

Put out Your hand to shelter them.

* * *

First the Mount of Remembrance. The smell of the archive. He’s never forgotten. The first time he came here: feeling physically sick. The smell of the past. As though his body was a box that someone had opened. Inside was something halfway dead. Rotting. After— He walked for hours in the sunlight. Trying to tape the edges shut.

The historian Michelet in the Paris archives: _As I breathed in their dust, I saw them rise up_. The dead, he meant. The dead as air. The dead as paper. Exhumation. Exhalation. _Exhuman los muertos. Exhument les morts_ , Michelet might have said. Then the fires of the Commune. Fifty years later. No more archives; no more dust. The flames were quick.

He is among the dead here. Housed in a box.

Only prying the lid off because the child—

No. He has to act without thinking about it.

He slides a sheet of paper into an envelope. Addresses it to the child. Fingertips lingering a second too long.

_Slicha, ani tsarikh… l’shal’cho… mikhtav ze.. ?_

Red taste of rust like old blood on his tongue.

* * *

He calls, and Charles says, “Hello?”

Erik doesn’t say anything.

Charles says, “Erik?”

“I did promise,” Erik says.

“Where’ve you landed?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I promised, too.”

“Hmm,” Erik says. “Israel.”

“Hmm,” Charles echoes.

Erik says, “Don’t.”

They sit in silence. Not silence. Sound of– something. A lawnmower. Very far off. Carried over the phone line. Phantom taste of green cut grass.

“What time is it there?” Erik asks.

“Just after three.”

“It’s night here.”

“Well, it would be, wouldn’t it.”

Erik closes his eyes. He could fall asleep like this. A door somewhere in Westchester creaks. A murmured voice. A question. Charles covering the phone. Scratch of pen on paper. A whole scene unfolds itself in his head. “How is… ?”

A pause.

“He’s fine,” Charles says at last. “Well. He’s a pain in the ass, as always. For some reason he’s decided we need a fish pond. What on earth do we want with a fish pond? I’m terrified he’s just going to show up one day with a bag full of live fish. Two bags full of live fish. Probably stolen.”

“Probably,” Erik agrees.

“A fish heist. That’s what I’m worried about. That’s what it’s come to.”

“There are worse things to worry about.”

“I know,” Charles says.

A pause.

Charles says, “He thinks you’re off blowing up banks or something.”

“I’ve never blown up a bank, Charles. Don’t give me ideas.”

“Dropping stadiums on people, then.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“I know.”

“I’m not—“

Charles says, “You don’t have to tell me.”

Erik cradles the phone between his shoulder and neck. Doesn’t say anything.

“It’s an expensive call,” Charles says. “To stay on the line and say nothing.”

“What would you like to talk about?”

“Nothing in particular, I suppose.”

Erik coils the phone’s cord around one finger. It feels like a Chinese finger trap. “You’re the one who asked me to promise.”

“I did. I know.”

“I can hear where you are. When you don’t talk. It’s… restful.”

Charles is silent. His breath, in and out. “I,” he says. “Erik, you know I—“

“You don’t have to tell me,” Erik says.

* * *

The next morning he finds a lizard on his balcony. Small and speckled. Its pulse beating very fast in its neck. It doesn’t seem frightened. He watches it for a while.

Drinking mint tea in the rising heat. His white cuffs buttoned. Sweat prickling his hairline.

How does anybody live here? His own ancestors. A long time ago. For thousands of years. In exile they hung their harps on the willows. They lay down beside the waters and wept.

In ’49, other children had kissed the dock in Haifa. Children. He, on the other hand. At sixteen years old.

But later he wept in the shuk, in the midst of the crowd, holding an apple. So many still alive. He hadn’t thought. Never imagined. Their warm voices, wild laughter, the way they wore their collars open, showing sunburned skin under shirts. The stall owner asking, _Ma kara? Yeled?_ But he didn’t speak Hebrew. He clutched the apple. The redness of it. The heaviness, the sweetness, ripe in his hand.

“Ma kara?” he says to the lizard.

It might be a gecko.

A nervous little creature. It blinks at him.

He smooths a gentle finger along the stucco. So close he could almost touch it. Trying not to frighten. “Ma kara, yeled?”

* * *

He’d thought— he’d wondered— if he came here—

But it’s no different. No different than it ever has been.

He walks the streets of the Old City and Nachlaot. Aimless. Observing. The shallow infrastructure under his feet. The feel of it. Not like a sound or a touch. Like a mood. Like a climate. Every city has its own magnetic weather. He’s never lost. He can tell where he is without maps.

A Roman cistern under a courtyard. Studded with lead and silver coins. No one knows they’re there. No one has unearthed them. A bronze lamp interred in a garden. Perhaps a thousand years old. Two thousand. Who is he to disturb it now? Let it sleep. Let it rest.

At the Mount of Olives, men and women leave stones on graves. This is an unfruitful landscape. Sun-bitten. The sky like glazed clay. Magnetic glare bouncing off the Dome of the Rock. A headache if he stays too long. He stares down at the lines of tombs, suit coat slung over his shoulder.

He could build a fortress out of the stones he owes his dead.

* * *

Once he’s recognized. A girl in a cafe, maybe eighteen years old. Black eyes, a tight braid of thick dark hair. She sits down across from him, uninvited. He’s drinking coffee. He sets the small cup down. Quiet, careful. The spoon rattles free of the saucer, grows sharp in his hand.

“No,” she says. “I’m not— I’m like you.”

Erik says, “I doubt that.”

“Would you like to see?”

Late afternoon. The side-street sparse and sluggish. Clatter of washing-up from inside the cafe. No observers. Still. A cloud of birds in his mind. Red paint writing fear on the line of a fence. It looked like blood. He knows the color.

But her face as calm as a Byzantine saint.

She reaches for his coffee cup. A thin fingertip dips into the silt. Almost at once it starts to stir and change. Something growing. A long branch. Drooping leaves. Flowers. The flowers fold into berries. A coffee shrub. Its roots overflow the cup, spread onto the table. It smells like ozone. The smell of lightning emerging from nothing.

“I was drinking that,” Erik says.

The girl says, “I saw you on the television. When I was a child. Back then I was starving; I couldn’t eat; when food touched my mouth it would just…” A gesture. A shudder. “The worst was meat. The bones grew back, the skin, and if there were feathers… My parents said it was a miracle. That God wanted me to die. Like that. I thought, why then make me? Just to suffer? And then I saw you, and I thought, No, that’s not why.”

Erik: his fist closed around the shard of metal. The former coffee spoon. Cutting his hand.

“There’s more of us,” she says. “We meet together. Jews and Arabs. We want to do something. To be something.”

“I can’t help you,” Erik says.

“But if you—“

“I don’t do that anymore.”

Though he doesn’t know if it’s true. He hasn’t thought so far ahead. He has to act without thinking about—

Red paint. The line of a fence. The little birds. _Mein Spatz._ Late afternoon. Sun. The child’s laugh.

When she’s gone he will loose his hold on the sharpened spoon. Blood will leak from his hand. Crooked over the white skin of his wrist. The cuff of his shirt stained bright red.

* * *

He should have asked her about the animals she’d mouthed life back into. Did they survive. Were they like other animals, after. What happened to them.

* * *

The television talks about meduzot warnings in Tel Aviv. Jellyfish season. Late this year. Scenes from another planet. The dark green sea hurling up danger. Translucent, strangely colored. Beautiful in the deep. On land become formless and fat with poison. The scourge of beachgoers. They aren’t trying to— but after all God made them to sting. To survive.

He drowses with the window open and dreams of underwater. He is not a sea creature, but he goes among the sea creatures. They blink at him warily across the blue landscape. So long as he holds his breath he can pass as one of them. But eventually he has to breathe. So then up, up, kicking, beating back the water. His lungs burn and when the sea finally casts him ashore, he sees that the long pale stretch of beach is littered with metal: drills and scalpels and half-melted bullets, gold rings and gold earrings and fine gold chains, the gold teeth he pulled from the dead’s open mouths. All spat out by indifferent waves. He too. A sand-speckled, shuddering creature.

He wakes to a Mizrahi music video on the television. A siren blaring outside in the street. He doesn’t know how long he’s slept. Maybe hours. It’s still hot. He strips off his shirt. Feels sticky. Exhausted. Flicks on a lamp without moving. His face in his hands.

The phone twitches towards him. He thinks, No. Then he thinks he won’t sleep again. So.

“Hello?” Charles says.

“It’s me.”

“Hello, Me. This is Charles Xavier.” Voice warm with wan hint of a laugh. “Isn’t it terribly late there?”

“You can tell?”

“I can do arithmetic.”

“I should certainly hope so. Professor.”

“It’s only been a week; don’t tell me you’re in trouble already.”

“No.” Erik looks down at his bandaged palm. “Someone recognized me. A mutant.”

“Ah.”

“She won’t make trouble, though.”

“Ah.” A different, carefuller tone.

“I didn’t hurt her.”

“I didn’t think that you did.”

“Of course you didn’t.” Erik lies back and stares up at the dim ceiling. The shadow of a moth. Huge and leaf-like. Lit by the lamp. Its wings are very monstrous and delicate-looking. “I used to live here. Did I ever tell you that?”

“In Israel?”

“For three years. In Haifa. I was resettled there.”

“But you left.”

“In ’52. I couldn’t… I couldn’t.”

A silence.

“I was there in ’52,” Charles says. Unexpected.

“In _Israel?_ ”

“In Haifa. During the summer. Doing fieldwork for my degree.”

Erik can’t think what to say to that.

“It was very beautiful,” Charles says into the long pause. “Though rather hot for my blood.”

“And mine. I left in June that year.”

“How extraordinary. I was there in June. Do you think we passed one other in the street? Probably not, I suppose. Still. Imagine if we’d met.”

Erik says, “I was a different person then.”

“I’m not sure _I_ was.”

“No. No, you never change.”

“So people have said. Though I think Hank would beg to differ.”

“Mm.”

A silence.

The sound of Westchester filters in. A bird in the eaves. Perhaps a mourning dove. The laughter of children. A floorboard creaks. A distant door slams.

“How is he?” Erik asks at last.

“Who? Hank?”

“Don’t be coy. It doesn’t suit you.”

“He’s fine,” Charles says. “He’s working in the garden. You could speak to him if you like.”

“No.”

“No. I should have guessed.”

Erik says, “Leave it alone, Charles.”

Silence. He wants to. He wants. Fingers tight around the phone.

Charles breathes out a muted sigh. “Sorry.”

Erik doesn’t say anything.

Silence. The white curtain flutters at the window.

“I wish I could have met you,” Charles says at last. “In ’52. I would’ve liked to have known you. You’d have found me unbearable, I think.”

“What makes you think I find you bearable now?”

“Ah, well, I am a mind-reader, you know.”

Erik smiles faintly. “I should let you go.”

“You should get some sleep,” Charles corrects. “Get some sleep, Erik.”

Erik doesn’t argue. But he doesn’t hang up the phone.

Charles sighs again. The sound is soft and familiar. “Just for another minute,” he says.

* * *

He wakes in the morning with the phone to his ear. The line having long since gone dead. The sun lapping at him with its warn tongue through the window. He turns on his side to stare at it.

In Westchester he’d slept in Charles’s bed three nights out of seven. One night of the other four he maybe slept. His body had forgotten how to sleep in an empty room. He drank until he passed out on the library sofa. Or prowled the burnt-out halls till day began. His brain a glass that dread slowly filled. He wanted to cut away his own skin. There were pills that didn’t help. Procured from somewhere. They turned him tired. He couldn’t keep horror at arm’s length. So. In the end. Charles’s bed. Charles pulling him down to the mattress. Like he was weightless as tinder. A heavy hand on his back. Held down like that he could sleep for ten hours. When he woke. A soft moment. Smell of morning. Pages turning: sound like bird’s wings. Charles reading quietly next to him.

Charles said, _If you would let me—_

And Erik said, _No._

His mind, his body, his grief were his own.

Here he sleeps in incidents and episodes most often. Blurred dreams infiltrated by heat. Noise. Sometimes he is back in Poland. But the child is there. The child. Now at work in the garden. Never to set foot in Poland. He won’t allow it. O Poland, Poland. _Moja ojczyzna._ In these dreams, the child is always dead.

The balcony. Hot on his bare feet. Excoriating sun. Stripping layers of him away. Is that the appeal? Batter my heart, one-person’d God? Oh, go ahead, hard desert selektioner of peoples. Till there’s nothing left but pulp. Don’t stop halfway done.

* * *

Taking the train to Tel Aviv. Then to Haifa. An expedition he hadn’t planned. But.

Green hills. Cypress. He doesn’t recognize the landscape. Hothouse orchards. Apples. Apples, in such a climate. The fruit of— not good and evil. Only knowledge. Phantom weight in his hand.

Closes his eyes. Rests his head. Sea in every direction when he awakens.

The sea he remembers. A week-long journey. He’d never seen the ocean before. The uneasy waves. Making him queasy. Strange magnetisms. Told everyone he got seasick. He lay on deck. The seabed far below him. Riddled with wreckage. Small coins. Submarines. An airless kingdom where no one could live. How he longed. An underwater dome. Or an asteroid in space. Above or below this middling Earth.

Then palm trees on the shoreline. The motherly Committee woman. Her bad German. _Willkommen in deinem neuen Heim!_ Her smile. Foreign. Spindly. Like the palm trees. He’d heard her say, _There’s something wrong with that child_. She didn’t know he had any English. Learnt in the DP camps. The predictable sort. But. Enough.

He has to push aside the thoughts.

Disembarking the train. The smell of the fresh sea air is good. Cooler here. The circling gulls. He buys an orange. A sandwich. A bottle of water. Sits on a wall overlooking the beach.

Imagine Charles. Younger even than in Miami. Fair-skinned. He would’ve freckled. Or sunburned. Looking imperious. Every inch the Young Effendi. Unpopular. Everyone hated the British. Oh, but Charles. Ever-so-disarming. No doubt walking around like he owned the place.

And Erik in ’52. Something still wrong with him. Sutured together. His ex-Haganah neighbor taught him how to kill a man. As though he didn’t know. Now he encompassed the subject. At times he suspected he didn’t exist. A ghost, maybe. A thing of air and shadow. Was it an improvement on human flesh? He didn’t truly feel temperatures or pain. He was aware of the heat. It made him sleepy. But he didn’t want to sleep. Walked down to the sea instead. The waves coming and going. Magnetic spirals. A golden ratio. The whole world humming to itself.

Once wandering near dawn out on beaches. Down onto one of the city’s waterfront piers. He’d seen a light stir. Very far out in the ocean. Under the surface of the water. The blackness, the blackness, and then— this. Blue-white as ice on December mornings. Only the smallest pinprick. Some animal, maybe, a squid or jellyfish or turtle. Moving out there alone in the sea. A stranger in this Babylon of waters. Searching for the rest of its kind. He felt something in his own body respond. As though they were kindred. This speck of alien light and he. Capable of intercommunication. _I see you_ , he wanted to say. _I see you._ It didn’t matter whether he could in turn be seen, whether whatever it was had eyes to see with, or ears, or even a brain as such. It was enough to see that light in the ocean.

Later he thought about it at stray odd moments. At the bottom of the Pentagon. When he closed his eyes. In Westchester. Awake too long. This vision flashed before him. A blue-white spark. Below the black water. A fire that burned and did not consume. Was it still out there, somewhere? Moving. Waiting. He couldn’t know for sure.

But he thought it was.

* * *

He buys the child a postcard with palm trees on it. In blocky script next to the address:

_Haifa— Horrible place I’ve always hated palm trees Lived here 1949-52._

Hesitates. Doesn’t know how to sign it.

* * *

What would it have been like? Charles. Haifa.

No. Just the thought. Charles in white linen. Wealthy. Oxbridge. Insufferable. Quaffing aperitifs. Erik insubstantial. Insolent. Accented English. Sharp smile. Cheap cigarettes. At least it wouldn’t have hurt when he. But would he have.

Another life he could have had.

If.

But the child. Born in ’57. Unbeknownst. Saved up. All those years.

Or— the rest. Perhaps. Less certain. So many ways two people can meet. Does he believe in machinations? Or God’s machinations strange beyond belief. He who lost a child and was allowed another. Small part of himself returned tenfold in secret. A benediction from the past. All that is over is not over. It still moves somewhere.

Alive, like all things that move.

* * *

Still wherever he goes in Haifa. The sun splitting objects from their shadows. The city teems with specters. A population of might-have-beens.

* * *

“Hello?” Charles says.

“What were you doing in Haifa?”

An exasperated sigh that becomes a laugh. “Fieldwork for my degree. I told you. Nice to speak with you, Erik, by the way.”

“Small talk.”

“It’s not small talk. It’s ordinary politeness.”

“I’ve never been ordinary. I see no reason to begin.” Erik sinks back onto his hotel bed. “What does that mean, fieldwork? Where were you working?”

“Why? Are you in Haifa?”

Erik doesn’t answer.

“Is your location somehow incriminating?”

“That’s not very trusting of you, Charles.”

“It was a very suspicious silence.”

“You haven’t answered the question.”

“Fine.” Charles makes a small annoyed sound. “It’s not a secret. I worked in a mental health center. I wanted to be a psychiatrist, at the time. I thought I could help people with my. You know.”

“But you changed your mind.”

“If you must know, yes.”

“Hmm.” He doesn’t ask. He lets the silence extend.

“I,” Charles says. “It was— difficult. I wasn’t really prepared. I didn’t know what it would be like when everyone around me was so— hurt. So very badly hurt. I’d always had the luxury of leaving before. My childhood wasn’t— terribly happy. But there were consolations.”

“You had the luxury of leaving here.”

“Yes. You’re right. I did, of course.”

It’s not like Charles. Erik frowns. “I expected you to argue.”

“I have no right, do I, really. In my defense, I was young. And people didn’t know, then. In England. _I_ didn’t know. About. I mean, the people in that center, they were— you see— and I’d thought— There were war victims in England, after all. So how different could it really be?”

Silence.

Charles says, “I’m not sure if you’re going to hang up now.”

“Twenty years ago I would’ve.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I’m trying to imagine the arrogance.” He can. He does. Surprised by the absence of anger. “God. I would have hated you.” Or. “I would have at least _tried_ to hate you.”

“You gave it a good shot anyway, as I recall.”

“No,” Erik says. Throat tight. “I could never put my heart into it.”

A pause.

Charles says, “I could, you know. I did. For a long time.”

“I’d rather that than you trying to save me.”

A sigh. “Well, I’m not trying to do that either, am I, anymore?”

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“I’m too old to save people.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

There’s a creak. Charles leaning back in his chair? Staring up at the ceiling perhaps. His study in Westchester. Erik can imagine it. “People who want to save people are always young. Did you never wonder why? No; I already know; don’t answer that question.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking it.”

“How would you know? You promised.”

“You don’t realize how predictable you are,” Charles says. “The answer is that they get old, and they realize you can’t just save people. It’s not a one-time thing, like breaking someone out of prison. You’ve got to keep saving them over and over. Birds and mountaintops, my friend.”

“What?”

“Have you never heard that story? Every year a bird brushes a mountaintop with its wing, or… sharpens its beak, or something, I never can remember. For thousands of years. And eventually the mountain’s worn down to nothing.”

“Save yourself some centuries. Blow up the mountain.”

“… _So_ predictable, you just can’t help yourself, can you?”

Erik’s laugh subsides to noiselessness.

He lets the silence drag.

A warm silence. Easeful. Like winter shelter.

He says at last, “Having children is like that; you have to—“

His voice dies without warning.

Charles is quiet for a long time. “I suppose loving someone is always a little like that.”

A pause. Silence.

“Is he…?” Erik asks.

“He asks me questions about you. He thinks he’s being subtle.”

“What do you tell him?”

“I never know what to tell him. I don’t know; what do you want me to tell him? What should I tell him?”

“You should tell him the truth,” Erik says.

* * *

On this street? On this corner? Charles, in Haifa. See the streets unburdened by thirty years. (All these new buildings sprung up like so many mushrooms. Israel. An infant. Not like he’d imagined. A child. Image of Jerusalem on the wall. Sketch of towers and domes. Done in brass-colored thread. It hadn’t occurred to him that people could live there. That people were living there. Already did.) ’52, far more ramshackle. Holding it together. So much energy. Eyes turned towards the new age. Hunting it in the desert. Erasing their footprints as they went. Who wants to remember? _You Europeans._ When they were done. Then. Then they could afford to. They would try to suture it back to the past.

He didn’t understand the impulse.

Did, later.

Now he finds he doesn’t understand it again.

* * *

Charles leaning against a wall. Wilting in the climate. His perfectly folded pocket square. Or a kerchief, perhaps. His hair long or short? He favored long. Expensive cigarette in his hand. Casual fingertips. Effortless gestures. Erik had once seen him peel an apple in the Westchester kitchen. All in one motion. He made it look easy. The skin coming off in one long strip. Neat and perfect. The smell of sweetness. Had he learned it already? In ’52? The trick. The talent.

The knife mild in his fist.

* * *

Or on the beaches, where now brown-skinned boys go laughing, salt thatching their curly hair, sleekly muscled, called things like Avi and Uri and Eitan, all these short, muscular sabra names—  oh, in ’52, how he’d’ve seethed at the sight. Erik, on the other hand, subject to sunburn. Didn’t take his shirt off. Not for anyone. Tall for the first time, though. Starting to be more than elbows and knees. Oh, in ’52, how he’d’ve stared at the sight of such boys aswim.

Would Charles have. Or, cuffs rolled knee-high, waded. Squinting at conches and fragments of sea glass. His earnestness couldn’t be feigned. Ever the scientist. Looking up, shielding his eyes to say—

* * *

Be real now, he thinks, picturing Charles _en repose_ in a garden. Pausing in the midst of city streets. You’d have been a case file. War victim. Just another number. Wasn’t he? Even later. In the water. Charles to the rescue once again.

The hard shell of his privilege not yet cracked. A half-formed embryo inside it.

The whole of him. Erik could fit it in one angry hand.

Now this ghost-Charles. Marveling at the shrubby blooms on the cacti. The native flowers planted round a small walk. The bench where he could rest below a palm tree. Erik imagines looking down at him. Shifts restlessly. One foot to another. Under the soles of his shoes. The white gravel of shells.

* * *

Days disappear in this manner. Easy in August. Or. September. Now. In fact. The same sky over and over. He drinks small cups of coffee, eats almost nothing.

For a long time afterwards he hadn’t eaten. As though grief were enough. The bread of grief. Bitter herbs.

He remembers in ’49: the same. No sense of hunger. Long after the boat-sickness had passed.

Years before he’d be hungry.

Till he’d forgotten what it felt like.

He smokes a cigarette sitting in a cafe. Sun-stunned. A butterfly investigates the table. Wings thinner than paper. Hairpin legs. Has it eyes? He can’t remember. Charles would know. As a species, butterflies feed on corpses. Not as bad as it sounds. Better than flies. He has the right to say it. He has seen this. Like flowers on the unclean flesh. Something had to grow there. Something had to come out of so much death. Things don’t stay the same forever. Nothing is sterile. God the maker. Given to fruitfulness.

Imagine Charles saying so. ’52. A fool, but a wise one.

_Things will change, Erik. Whatever else happens, that much is always true._

What would he have said? What would Charles have said in turn?

Another life they could have had. If.

He stretches a hand across the table. The butterfly probes his fingertip. Delicate; suspicious. Raises an antenna like an eyebrow. Unimpressed at its findings.

“No,” Erik says. “Not dead yet.”

* * *

He considers calling Charles. Gets as far as the phone in his hand. Warm and heavy and filled with metal. All the wires that circle the world.

But then. What to say.

_I think I saw our phantoms._

_Do you ever think it’s not just the dead we carry._

_We carry the lives we might have lived._

Like the dead but not dead. So how can you mourn.

Who can you hold to account for the violence done against them.

How can he say that to Charles. Who knows already.

Sinking onto the bed. Pressing the phone against his chest. As though his heartbeat might transmit. Out into the darkness across the ocean.

And Charles, hearing. Learn to interpret it.

* * *

That night he swims.

He never swims in the day. Sun. Exposure makes him shiver. The numbers, and a thousand other marks. The Doctrine of Signatures. Seventeenth century. Philosophers. Germans. God writes on each plant the thing that it’s made for. Only not God, in this case, but. Germans. Always Germans.

He dives into the dark surf and comes out raw. Rocked back by the charging waves’ dissonant impulsions. Grip of water upon him. Anti-grip.

Adrift for a while on the face of the waters. Night sky overhead. The city too neon for enough starlight. How things have changed since ’52. He would never see that light now. There on the horizon. Would never know that animal life was out there. That any life could be like that.

The sea delivers him to shore, cold and salt-scoured. Breathless and shuddering. Sand abrading his palms.

He flings himself back. Beating fists against indifferent forces. Arms, shoulders thrashing.

Rip me apart, wave-teeth of whatever is almighty. If that’s what you want. Don’t spit me out.

Against the beach. Scraped by grit and rubble. Body thrown to the ocean. Again. Again.

In ’49, ’52: a different body. Scars now that he didn’t have. Then. Already. So many scars. Was there ever a day when he was just skin? God’s handwriting still fresh. He signs His work. Says. It is for this that I made you. When I had not yet formed you in the womb. I knew you. I knew.

God the father.

All the graves of His children.

What more could He want than for them to live.

Just live.

The forest full of birds on the day he. They gathered like mourners. He with the shovel still in his hand. Thin line of gold thread under the ground. Trees hushed and the weft of him unspooling. The years and years and years ahead. Never to be lived. All his hothouse love. Never to be harvested. His body swollen, bruised. Overripe. Think of the brush of wings. The mountain. The bird grown dizzy and lost without it. It happens. Birds. Butterflies. Animals. Unable to adapt. How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange place? Tell me. Please. How a father could do it.

He swallows salt. The waves like slaps. He is treading water. His skin hurts. Like sand has scraped off a layer.

The child. In New York. _I don’t have anything to give you_ , he’d told him. And what he had meant. _I have nothing left to give you_. But he’d known it wasn’t true. No matter how much he wanted. To be done, finished. Even then. He could feel the new love splitting its seed case. No, he’d thought, no, no, no, I can’t do this, I can’t, I can’t do it, I can’t bear to do it again. Seal up my heart and let it be sterile.

Even God must feel sometimes unequal to love.

So why then, still, still, did He make me for this?

* * *

On the beach afterwards. Shivering in a t-shirt. Sand still sticking to his elbows and knees. Sun coming up on the other side of the city. Cars starting to fill the streets again. Smell of bread from early ovens. Metal warming. Pipes all a-hum with water. Streetlights snapping off on timers. How can it be so ordinary? All of it. Day after day.

Walking. Barefoot on the damp sand. Studded with sea life. Little cracked-open shells. Here and there something spiny that survives. Crawling back towards the water. Awkward-legged.

Spies a stray jellyfish just at the tideline. Damp, translucent, and shapeless. Dead, or not? Difficult to say. On land they always look dead. When the tide comes, who knows, it might yet come to life. Carried out past the treacherous shallow waters. To the deep, to extend its balletic tendrils. To do the mysterious work of its body. To breathe. To rise, to rise, to rise.

* * *

Charles picks up on the sixth ring. “Hello?”

“I was thinking I might come back for the holidays,” Erik says.

“I assume you don’t mean in December.”

“Tomorrow, I thought.”

“I appreciate the advance warning.”

“I know how you like surprises.”

Charles blows out a slow breath. “I like seeing you,” he says. “My friend.”

To which Erik has no response. So he lets the silence deepen.

A muted voice in the background. Charles moving. Covering the receiver? A murmur: _No, sorry, you’ll have to excuse me—_

“I’ve called at a bad time,” Erik says.

“No. No, it’s quite all right. It’s always— what I mean to say is, you’re always welcome.”

Erik crosses the room. Carrying the phone with him. Leans against the window. Cradling receiver to his shoulder. Looking out. Waking world. Crawl of water. It was the Rhine where. When he was a boy. The casting off of sins. So easy then. The weight of a pebble. Nothing that the river couldn’t bear. “It’s the New Year. It will be the New Year.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I thought— I might spend it with my son.”

“I think he’d like that.”

Silence.

“Charles,” Erik says.

“I’m still here,” Charles says.

“Yes,” Erik says. “I know.”

Sounds of Westchester. Soft rasp of paper. The window open. Wind in the beech trees. Soon the leaves will be falling. The colors they’ll turn. Copper and red.

Erik says, “I’d like to be there too.”

A hesitation. “I’ve already said it’s all right.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll stay through Yom Kippur, at least?”

“I have a lot of atoning to do.”

“You’ve atoned quite a bit, I would’ve thought.”

“Not enough,” Erik says. Then. Pauses. “I’d like to be where you are. For a little while. In case you didn’t—“

“I did,” Charles says. Too fast. “I did; I— do.”

“That’s all right, then?”

“Yes. It’s— yes, it’s all right.”

A silence. The both of them breathe into it.

“I’ll bring gifts,” Erik says. “For the holiday. Souvenirs, maybe.”

Laughter. Breaking the tension. “I shudder to think.”

“Nothing that offends your political scruples. I know your views on Palestine.”

“Let’s categorize all weaponry as politically offensive, shall we?”

“Always so conservative, Charles.”

“Possibly I should require you to tell me what you’re bringing in advance.”

“And spoil the surprise?”

“You know how I like surprises. Go on, spare me the sleepless night. Tell me.”

There’s warmth in his voice. The weight of fondness. It catches Erik off-guard. To have this. After all. Here for the taking. The sweetness of it. In the palm of his hand. He tastes salt. Lungs struggle. Scrubs tears off his face. Must make a sound. The way his breath wobbles. He can’t manage to swallow it back.

“Erik?” Charles says. “Are you still there?”

“Apples. I’m bringing apples,” Erik says.

 

**Author's Note:**

> There are Biblical references scattered throughout here.
> 
> _Slicha, ani tsarikh… l’shal’cho… mikhtav ze.. ?_ : roughly, "Excuse me, I need to send this letter?"
> 
> _Ma kara, yeled?_ : "What's wrong, child?"
> 
> Many, many thanks to [inanna](http://archiveofourown.org/users/inanna) for her thoughtful and knowledgeable beta.


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